


Barnes and Noble

by Hawk (Hawk87)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s, Bucky Barnes Feels, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Gift Fic, M/M, Multi-Era, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Reading, Sick Character, Sick Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25595845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hawk87/pseuds/Hawk
Summary: When Steve was sick, Bucky would sit in vigil by his bedside and read.Now, almost a century later, Steve returns the favour.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	Barnes and Noble

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thechosennerf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thechosennerf/gifts).



> For Thechosennerf <3 Thank you for the wonderful prompt!

The voice of Mrs Rogers, though a soft-spoken woman, could be heard through the thin door to Steve’s room. “In the midst of a garden there grew a rose bush, quite covered with roses, and in the most beautiful of them all there lived an elf – an elf so tiny that no mortal eye could see him.” Bucky crept closer, the door open a crack to reveal the dim light of the sunset as he strained his eyes to see the two. He had come to make sure that Steve was well, as well as he could be with his newest affliction at least, but as his eyes fell on the bed, he was satisfied with the sight of him. He was tucked up tightly in his blankets, a cloth upon his brow to mop up the sweats of his fever… and Mrs Rogers sat by his bedside with a book in hand. “But he was well made and as perfect as any child could be, and he had wings reaching from his shoulders to his feet. Behind each petal of the rose he had a tiny bedroom. Oh, how fragrant his rooms were…” Steve’s eyes were half-lidded; Bucky could see the pain in them even at this distance but he saw the shine in them too, the way he seemed to be fighting to retain his consciousness as he hung upon the words of the fairy tale and the slight lean of his body closer to his mother’s lyrical tone. Bucky was just as enthralled.

When Steve’s eyes did close, so did the book, soft and careful as it was laid upon the table at Steve’s bedside for another day. Bucky jumped back from the door quickly, his feet carrying him in a panic back to the living room where he did pretend to have been the entire time. He was fifteen, a whole year older than Steve and he would not have it be known that he had been eavesdropping upon the twisted fairy tale.

“He’s sleeping now,” Mrs Rogers assured him, moving the kettle onto the stove with a knowing smile. “You can go up and sit with him if your father is not expecting you?”

“No, Ma’am. Thank you, Ma’am.” Bucky lived with his father. His own mother had died when he was but a boy, her vision of dark curls and blue eyes nothing but a faint memory to the teenager now. His father though was a good man. George Barnes was a military man; before the loss of his mother, they had travelled frequently but they had settled now. Brooklyn was home and he understood well enough that for Bucky, the Rogers’ were a second family to him. Mrs Rogers was no replacement for his own mother, but she was kind and accepting and took Bucky under her wing and Steve… George Barnes understood that about as well as the teenager did himself. There was something there that made a young heart flutter with excitement and trepidation… and a fear whenever he saw Steve in this state.

Steve’s breathing was laboured; Bucky could hear him through that same crack in the door as he quietly slipped into the room, his socks cushioning his steps even as he tried to tiptoe over to the chair by his bedside. He had not seen him this sick for a while now… Steve had suffered a variety of illnesses in the two years that he had known him now and he had been around for asthma attacks and backache and that one terrifying time that he had coughed up a blood clot and they thought he was going to die from tuberculosis. This time it was the flu. It came with tremors that jarred Steve’s bent spine and sweats that poured through his pillowcases. It came with a stuffy nose that travelled up to his forehead and pressured his brain into a throbbing headache and chills that made him shiver, though his skin was hot to the touch. Bucky reached out to take the cloth from his head to the basin where he wrung it and refreshed it before bringing it back to lay across his brow.

This was not Bucky’s first vigil. It would not be the last.

His focus now was on the rise and fall of Steve’s chest… and a hardback on the nightstand. His eyes moved to the book, its blue cloth covering now familiar to him and the title imprinted upon the spine in gold leaf: “Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales.” Unbidden, his hand moved to take it, the page falling open like destiny at the place Mrs Rogers had left off and Bucky scanned over the words he had heard before. He glanced at Steve’s lidded eyes, smiled, and began to read on.

“All day long the little elf… rejoiced in the warm sun… sunshine as he flew from flower to flower or d… dan… danced on the wings of the fluttering… butterflies.” He was not the most confident of readers; he was not by any means an unintelligent young man and he had for a year now been working as a paperboy and thus he had practised with the headlines that he needed to shout upon the street corners but those were designed to be simple and easily read, eye-catching and shocking. This was somewhat more advanced for a boy who outside of his schooling had never thought to pick up a book and read it. And somehow, even asleep, he was nervous to speak the words aloud to his far more literate best friend. “And m… me… as… sure… measured how many steps he would have to take to pass along all the roads and paths on a single linden leaf.” Bucky’s smarts were street smarts; he knew how to build a car engine from scraps or power a lamp with a simple motor but this? This was different. This was something that he wanted to do, and he wanted to make sure that Steve, though sleeping, did not miss out on the story.

And if Steve’s eyelids did flutter or his lips did twist into a smile as Bucky continued to read the tale of The Rose Elf, the older teen did not notice, so focused was he on getting the words right for him.

“You see, what we call the veins on a leaf were highroads and byways to him. It was a long journey, and he had begun it rather late, so before he finished, the sun had gone down!”

From that day forth, reading became something of a ritual; when Steve was sick, Bucky picked up this book. As Steve combatted this flu, he worked his way through the remainder of The Rose Elf. When Mrs Rogers died, he read The Snow Queen and The Daisy. When Steve was stricken by pneumonia, he read for him The Princess and The Bean. Each night of sickness, grief or nightmare, the blue cover would emerge from its drawer and open to some new fairy tale until, through days and years of sickness and healing, Bucky had read every single one and knew them as well as he knew himself. And read them he did with the confidence of a man who found passion in the well-worn pages of their book.

On the night he shipped out, he pulled Steve into his arms. “Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.”

“How can I? You’re taking all the stupid with you.”

When Bucky unpacked in his tent on the front lines, his fingers brushed a familiar spine and a smile graced his lips as he turned to the front page and saw a new pen mark under the title line in Steve’s scratchy scrawl. He choked on the words, on a sob as he thought of Steve back in Brooklyn and that night, he prayed for him. Prayed that he would somehow make it through his first winter alone, that the wind would never chill him, and the fever would always break before it took hold. His thumb brushed the signature, a single drop from his eyes smudging the black of the pen. “Don’t win the war till I get there.”

***

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

Bucky had been lost lately… Steve could not blame him after everything that he had been through, after everything they had been through, but to see his eyes without their old familiar light was still a thorn in the vines around Steve’s heart. Where Bucky was concerned, love bloomed and grew within Steve’s chest like a rose bush, so beautiful that Steve would vomit petals with each moment he saw a lack of recognition in his friend’s eyes. It wasn’t always. Some days Bucky did remember him, and Steve lived for those days where the sun shone from his blue irises and his love was returned, but others he seemed to forget, his cognitive abilities lost until he could barely register a text upon his phone much less read it and as a result the moments of unrequited love sometimes rendered Steve unable to breathe… and if the disease someday overcame his lungs then so be it. The vines could continue to twist and snare his heart and Steve would simply power through those moments as he fought to bring the happiness back to his friend.

Steve had tried to bring him back to life; since returning from the cryo chamber in Wakanda they had discovered that not everything could be fixed quite so easily. His freedom had been granted, the words that had once locked him into servitude to HYDRA nothing but a foul taste in their mouths but his mind… he wasn’t free. It wasn’t free from the pain, the guilt, the nightmares or the shame and though Steve had tried, he could not snap him out of it. The things that had once brought joy seemed to bring only the ghosts of old smiles to the broken soldier now. 

Coney Island had brought a nostalgia as they ate cotton candy and corn dogs before riding the Cyclone, neither man with a weak enough stomach now to puke but the exhilaration was the same, drawing a glimmer of recognition and a smile from Bucky. The Ferris Wheel too had drawn them close enough to touch their lips together in shyness when it reached its peak… But when they returned home that evening, the tiredness settled into Bucky’s injured mind and as Steve served up their take-out pizza, he saw the confusion of not knowing back in Bucky’s eyes. “Your name is James Barnes… Bucky…”

A blink. A nod. A forced smile that said he understood and accepted the name given to him, but he did not remember.

An art class had been an entertaining attempt too to bring back the man that Bucky had been and for a time there had been laugher as Bucky attempted to paint a ‘happy little tree’ but again, by the time they were home, the reminder passed Steve’s lips again as he tucked Bucky’s hair behind his ear and dimmed the bedside lamp, letting the darkness sweep over the both of them.

Steve had even, in his desperation, enlisted the help of Stark and though the genius had been reluctant, he was always keen on a challenge – particularly if that challenge involved achieving something that his own father never had. So, when Steve asked him to replicate the hovercar Howard had displayed at the Stark Expo of 1943, he saw Bucky’s eyes truly shine for the first time when it did lift off and the smile he gave him was that very same smile he had searched the crowd with back then, when Steve had already run off to find another enlistment office. Steve truly thought that they had made some breakthrough that day… until he found Bucky wandering the halls sometime around three with a vacant expression and his lips forming his own name. “Bucky… My name is Bucky.”

“Yeah, Pal… C’mon. Let’s get you back to bed.”

From there, Steve would soothe him the best he could while his own heart bled for his lost friend.

Bucky seemed most himself in thrift stores; they were like hidden cities within the labyrinth of contemporary steel and glass buildings that Brooklyn had become. Steve was fond of the Heights and their red brickwork and arches, but he had turned down the opportunity to live overlooking the park when the real estate agent had proudly put forth the option as vintage and ‘in need of updating’. His gut had twisted, and he realised that he was far happier in the small apartment that he had since come to share with Bucky, that they had made their own through outings like this. In thrift stores, things weren’t often vintage for the volunteers there did not know the decades and they were instead marked as bargains and gems from the past… Steve and Bucky’s past. They had picked up trinkets aplenty and today was no different, Steve’s fingers trailing through rails of aged clothes and leather jackets, Bucky off somewhere with the model cars and porcelain dolls…

It was as he passed the old bookshelf that his eyes caught a familiar cover and the idea came to him.

A calloused thumb traced over the spine for a moment, lost in old memories that this book held. It was not theirs; theirs had been lost to time but this was a fair imitation of it, born of the same decade with its blue cloth cover torn and faded, its gilt title dulled, and pages yellowed. It had lost its dust jacket along the way but there was no weakness to its hinged spine, no rolling or creases to tell of its frequent reading as theirs once had… Steve smiled faintly as his thumb paused over the title “Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales”. Theirs would not have been passable as an object for sale now. Perhaps if the historians had known that it had been read and loved by Captain America himself but no, theirs had been damaged and coffee stained. Pages had fallen from the spine only to be stuck back into place with cheap glue and the cover had taken a fair beating from Steve’s frustrated acts of throwing it across the room as he shouted Bucky away in his fever-driven exasperation. This one was almost pristine by comparison, well worth the thirty dollars that Steve had just spent on it. This one bore a few pen marks to the front endpaper and someone along the way had taken a crayon to the illustrations, a child, he presumed, from the quality of the linework and that colour too had faded across the years. He couldn’t complain; he had been tempted himself as a young teen to practice his colour work on the pages of such an impressive illustrator that was Heath Robinson, but his mother’s chiding rang in his ears long after she was gone. “If you wish to be respected as an artist then you must learn to respect the art of others, as it was given to you.”

Steve tucked the book away quickly, a secret for the time being.

It occurred to Steve that Bucky, though a proficient reader, had come to struggle with it now, much as he struggled with life’s other joys. While Bucky proved time and time again that he could read and record mission logs with accurate efficiency, should Steve ever ask him to read something of a more pleasurable nature, he would fumble, his frustration growing until he gave up on the act. Steve was no doctor, neither of medicine nor psychiatry, but he could make his guesses about how Bucky’s fried cortex responded to failing tasks. And as he laid the soldier in bed that night, tucking the blanket around him, Steve saw a child. He saw him as though it was Steve himself in the bed, the vision so vivid that he reached a hand up to check his own brow for the damp flannel he recalled being there on occasions like this. He saw Bucky, no older than fifteen, his checked hand-me-down shirt a fraction too big for the boy who would not reach his growth spurt for two years yet, and his woollen socks propped against the wooden bed frame, a toe poking through a hole yet to be darned…

“Seen a ghost, Stevie?”

It was already a good night. Steve swallowed back his smile at the familiar nickname and shrugged, “Something like that.” He moved a chair closer to the bed, ignoring the curious, if not slightly concerned, quirk of Bucky’s brow, and sat down upon it, leaning back so that his own socks were resting upon the plump mattress somewhere by Bucky’s thighs.

“You’ll fall if you sit like that. Your Ma teach you nothing?” Bucky smirked.

“Never stopped you.”

With that, Steve removed the book from within his jacket, its heavy binding a comfort more than he would like to admit to it being even if this didn’t work. He turned to the title page, running a thumb over the blank space where his signature had once tarnished the page of their own copy before his fingers let the pages slip through to somewhere around halfway, page 238 to be precise. If he caught Bucky’s eyes upon him in something someone might mistake for awe then he said nothing, wishing not to ruin what could be here. But as the words moved from his lips, he caught sight of a gentle smile and he knew… He knew that for the first time in a long time, Bucky was seeing him again. For the first time in almost a century, they were just two boys, fighting their way through their illnesses with the life lessons of their favourite fairy tale.

“In the midst of a garden there grew a rose bush… quite covered with roses, and in the most beautiful of them all there lived an elf.”


End file.
